


The Renewal

by owlgal



Series: Survivors [1]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Angst and Feels, Ax is a cinnamon roll, Ax is hungry, Bad Jokes, Dad!Tobias, Family, Family Bonding, Family Feels, Fluff and Angst, Inspirational Speeches, Martial Arts, Mom!Rachel, Multi, Post-Break Up, after the war, all grown up, morphing, parenting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:41:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26556757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlgal/pseuds/owlgal
Summary: “We didn’t fight this whole war, then build this new world, so that you could just give up! So you’re not giving up. You’re not allowed to."All I know is that your family needs you. They’ll always need you. And you made a choice to be there when they needed you. This is what that means. Some people get sick, some people get depressed, but they still have to fight. To live. To have a good life. And that means you still have to fight."*     *     *This fic grew out of me obsessively wondering what our intrepid child soldiers would be like if they'd all been allowed to grow up. I have no issues with the ending (until that last paragraph, anyway), but fanfic is all about reimagining our favorite stories and characters. So I obsessed, and sat down to write a scene, and accidently wrote a novel.This fic was inspired and informed by the Animorphs Anonymous podcast, which has the most wholesome and welcoming community I've ever encountered on the internet. Love you guys, and I hope you like your present!
Relationships: Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill & Jake Berenson & Cassie & Marco & Rachel & Tobias, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill & Rachel, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill & Tobias (Animorphs), Cassie & Rachel (Animorphs), Cassie & Tobias (Animorphs), Marco & Rachel (Animorphs), Marco & Tobias (Animorphs), Rachel (Animorphs)/Tobias (Animorphs)
Series: Survivors [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1931365
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18
Collections: Animorphs Anon Fics





	1. Tobias

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is nearly finished, it mostly just needs to be edited. So don't be afraid that you'll be left hanging, because I've already written the conclusion. And the epilogue. And an accidental spin-off.

_Fssssh_.

The darkened glass of our back door slid open to let in the morning sun - and an Andalite.

 _Fssssh_.

The sound of the door always reminded me of an airlock, as if the simple glass could seal us in, creating a barrier between us and the chaos of the world. Rachel and I both pretended that it could - that the walls of our family’s little compound could hide us from the rest of the world.

<Good morning, Tobias.>

<Ax.>

I was too irritated by the early morning to be civil. Besides, I was still preening the coverts on my left wing. These days, my feathers always seemed ragged. I could never seem to get the barbs to hook together right.

<I apologize for coming on such short notice.>

Ax stepped delicately off the welcome mat and into the living room. He hung his small briefcase on a hook near the door and simply stood for a moment, drooping. I may not have slept very well, but it looked like Ax hadn’t gotten any sleep. I immediately felt guilty for being irritated by something as small as waking up early.

<Don’t worry about it, Ax. The kids usually wake us up around now anyway, and you know you’re always welcome here.>

I fluttered down from where I’d been perched - on one of the ropes that were strung across the ceiling - to a more traditional perch set up near the door. 

<So, how do you want to do this? Human? Andalite? Do you want some coffee or breakfast?>

<I would enjoy coffee and breakfast, if you would be so kind.>

Ax’s eyes lit up a bit at the mention of food, as I had known they would. There was no better way to cheer up an Andalite than to tickle their newly discovered taste buds. Ax began to morph into his human form, a mix of the DNA he had acquired from my friends when we first met him. Back then he had been an andryogenous beauty, but still a skinny teenager. Now, a dozen years later, his human morph had grown up. He was tall, taller than me, with plenty of muscle and a face whose ethnicity you couldn’t quite place. 

I changed into my own human morph, growing from a 18” hawk into a 5’9” human in hardly any time at all. It always felt wrong for a moment, as my senses were decimated and my protective coating of feathers vanished, but I had learned to adjust to the change. I grabbed a bathrobe off one of the hooks by the door and tied it around my newly human body. I pulled a cheap watch out of the robe pocket and strapped it around my wrist, starting the 110 minute timer that was preset on all of our watches. I stared at the seconds as they ticked by. Being reminded of my limits didn’t do anything to help my mood.

Ax didn’t seem to notice my preoccupation with the watch and headed towards the kitchen. I had to follow him in. It was unwise to leave Ax unsupervised in a room full of food. I found Ax standing at the counter, pawing through a drawerful of instant coffee flavors.

“Which of these should I choose, my brother?” 

Ax held some packets up for me to inspect. 

“Ilsen says I am allloooowed to have only one cup of coffee in the morning.”

I winced, wondering what Ax had done to make his mate issue that kind of command, but glanced at the flavors of coffee that Ax held.

“You should have the Columbian Dark.” I turned to pull mugs from one of the cabinets. “Then you can have some tea, and maybe hot chocolate too.” I lined up a few extra mugs on the counter.

“Hot chocolate. I will have hot chocolate,” Ax mused. “And teeeeeeeeea.” 

Now that he was the Andalite’s chief representative on Earth, Ax knew how to speak without playing with the words. His speeches, which were sometimes televised, could even be inspiring. But when he was with his friends, Ax tended to revert back to his old habits. I guess he felt more comfortable around us, like he could show us the parts of himself that he couldn’t show others for the sake of social niceties and public relations.

That didn’t keep him from being any less annoying.

“Ax, perfect.” Rachel’s head appeared from around the corner. “Here, hold Loren for me. Nik won’t stop begging me to take her to the bathroom.” 

Rachel thrust the baby we had named after my mother into Ax’s arms and left. A child’s whine floated down from the other end of the house. 

“I know sweetie, Mommy’s coming,” Rachel called. “Tobias, would you get Lor’s bottle?”

“Got it!” 

I pulled open the fridge door and got out one of the bottles of pumped milk that we stored there and stuck it into the bottle warmer, then glanced at Ax. He was staring at my son like he’d just discovered dessert pizza. Ax cradled Loren to his human chest, offering the boy one of his fingers to suck on. My mouth opened into a grin. The Andalite had always been helpless when faced with our children.

While Ax was preoccupied with babbling at the baby, I made three cups of Columbian Dark and pulled the eggs and bacon out of the fridge. I usually did the cooking, since Rachel didn’t have the patience for it, and I’d made this breakfast hundreds of times by now. When the bottle warmer went off I handed the milk to Ax, who began feeding Loren while making cooing noises at him. 

I started cracking eggs into the pan. _Two for each of us… I may as well cook the whole dozen, since Ax is here_. The smell of the eggs and bacon frying lured the rest of my family into the kitchen.

"Unki Ax!!" Ax barely managed to avoid falling over as our oldest daughter, Elanor, slammed into his legs from behind.

"Ellie, don’t run into your uncle,” Rachel said absentmindedly as she appeared in the doorway again. She plucked the six-year-old off of the Andalite with one hand while she grabbed Nikki with the other to stop her from copying her sister. 

“Good morning, Ax,” Rachel nodded towards the Andalite. “Switch with me?”

Ax looked torn between holding the baby and playing with the girls, but he nodded back to Rachel. Somehow, they managed to switch children without anyone falling over or even dropping Loren’s bottle. While the girls ran circles around their favorite uncle, I served up the eggs and bacon. I managed to get all the food to the table without tripping over one of the girls, a small miracle even when Ax wasn’t there to entertain them. Once the adults sat down the girls settled in as well, and for a few moments everything was quiet.

“Unki Ax, did you bring us a present?” Quiet never lasted long in a house full of children.

“No, young Elanor. I did not have time to find a prezzzzzent for you this morning, but I will bring one next time. What would you like? K,k.”

“Ax, you don’t have to bring them something every time you come,” Rachel objected. “They have plenty of toys - they leave them all over the house.”

“I want a book!” Ellie and Ax ignored Rachel completely, always a dangerous move. “A book about Grandpa!”

“Grandpa! Grandpa! A story about Grandpa!” Nikki banged her fork on the table, and I was glad I only had human ears. Ax decided to indulge the girls and began their favorite story, one where he and Elfangor had played some practical jokes on a crew member of their ship. Even now, it was weird to think that Ax was my uncle. Knowing that my dad was an alien who had been a soldier and a time traveler and a hero was actually a little easier for me to grasp. I tuned out of Ax’s story - I’d heard it dozens of times before - and watched Rachel feeding Loren.

Rachel was more beautiful than she had ever been before. I had the same thought every day, and every day it seemed more true. She hadn’t yet put up her long golden hair, and it fell over her face and shoulders like streams of sunlight. Her chair was next to the tall windows that surrounded the breakfast nook, and the bright light made it seem as if she was glowing against the picturesque redwood trees beyond. She smiled down at Loren, her face drawn by the lack of sleep that accompanies nightmares and four-month-old babies. The look on her face was gentle, for Rachel, but it was also the face of a warrior promising protection. 

Rachel and I had discovered, in those first few months after Ellie was born, that there was more to love than we had ever imagined. We had loved each other, our friends, our family, our species. We loved enough to die, enough to kill. But it was only when we were faced with a newborn child of our own that we discovered the kind of love that would happily burn the world down and dance in the ashes if we thought she needed it.

There was something different about having responsibility for a person, a person who was entirely yours. A beautiful, perfect, helpless baby who needed your help for everything. Rachel and I had spent three long years in hell, fighting almost without hope for the nebulous idea of “saving the world.” At first, we had fought because it had seemed like the right thing to do. Later, we had fought merely to keep ourselves and our families alive. When you back an animal into a corner, it will fight you with its entire strength and will. We had fought the same way - we had killed hundreds, thousands, of enemy Yeerks, and most of them had died along with an innocent host body who had been dragged along into the fight. But when I was faced with Elanor’s pure, innocent, perfect life, all of it seemed worth it. We had done terrible things, but those things had created a world that would allow someone as beautiful as her to exist. When I remembered my love for my wife, for my children, anything was worth it. I didn’t regret a thing.

“Got you!” 

Nikki launched a forkful of scrambled eggs straight at her sister’s face. Ellie shrieked, and lunged across the table towards her attacker. Rachel dumped Loren in my arms and shot out of her seat, grabbing Ellie before she could deal any serious damage to her four year old sister. On the other side of the table, Ax was trying to keep Nikki from throwing any more of her food away.

“No, young Nicole,” Ax lectured my unheeding daughter. “Food is a pressscious thing. It must not be wasted.” 

Nikki ignored him, attempting to throw her plate at Ellie in lieu of her eggs until Ax removed it from her grasp and lifted her out of her chair. Rachel shot me a desperate look, and I knew she was trying hard to keep her cool. That meant it was my turn.

"That's _enough_ , girls." 

My voice cut through the sound of squabbling and Ellie and Nikki turned to look at me, surprised. I didn't raise my voice often around the girls, at least not in my human morph, but it was better than letting Rachel yell at them. The last time Nikki had cried for an hour, and Rachel had vanished into the basement dojo for the rest of the day. I had found her there hours later, sitting in a puddle of sweat, beating her fists weakly against a punching bag. That had been a bad day. Luckily, we were saved from that fate by the timely arrival of the girls' nanny.

"Good morning, sister Rachel. Brother Tobias." 

The glass door swished open again to let Jak Hirah, the Hork-Bajir nanny that Toby had hand picked for us, into the house. 

"Brother Ax. Little ones. You are ready?" 

The girls scampered out of their chairs and rushed to hug Jak, careful to avoid the blades on her legs. Most Humans would think that a Hork-Bajir is the last species they would want around their children - and if you only considered appearances, they might be correct. But we had lived with the free Hork-Bajir near the end of the war and we had seen just how much they loved children of any species. Jak had raised many children and grandchildren of her own and we knew she would cut off her own arm before she let one of the girls get hurt. Besides, who better to have as a bodyguard than a seven-foot tall lizard warrior who was covered from head to toe in wickedly sharp blades. Knowing that Jak was looking out for the girls while they were at school or out playing gave Rachel and I a peace of mind we could have never had without her. And the girls adored her.

“Good morning, Jak Hirah.” I stood and nodded towards the Hork-Bajir. “The girls are done eating; they just need to get dressed.” 

A few feet away from me, Rachel stared intently at the jagged scar that flowed down Jak Hirah’s arm. That wound had been ripped by Rachel in her grizzly bear morph sixteen years ago, when Jak Hirah had worn a blue band on her arm. Jak had told us that she didn’t blame Rachel for the wound. She had told us about the triumph she’d felt that day when the Yeerk that had hijacked her life felt such strong fear that it turned and ran from the battle. On the good days, Rachel could forgive herself for inflicting such pain on someone who was now a friend. On the bad days, Rachel blamed herself for every hurt that Jak Hirah had endured.

“They will be dressed,” Jak Hirah said. “Then we will go to school. I have brought Sister Cassie to see you.”

Rachel smiled and stepped forward to greet her friend. I looked away. I’d been expecting this visit for days now, since my last checkup with Cassie’s vet team. The fact that she’d come to deliver the news in person meant that it was bad news. 

I felt dread settle into my human stomach, making the breakfast I’d eaten feel like it was weighing me down. Jak Hirah herded my daughters towards their bedroom, and another Hork-Bajir stepped out from behind her, beginning the morph back into human.

It was an absolute pleasure to watch Cassie morph. No other _estreen_ in the universe had half as many morph counts as she did. A group of the Andalite morphing artists had sought Cassie out in the months after the war had ended and had taught her the fundamentals of the art. Cassie had soaked it up like a sponge. After a few weeks the Andalites were on the way back to their homeworld, declaring that even though Cassie was human, there would never be an _estreen_ to rival her. They hadn’t even sounded bitter about it. These days, Cassie often performed at benefits or schools, or at Liberation Day celebrations. Even when she wasn’t performing Cassie kept the mentality of an artist, and her morphs had become insanely beautiful.

She started by shrinking into her full 5’4" stature, the Hork-Bajir features smoothing out into something more human. Her skin darkened towards her natural shade, the scaley leather fading until it was merely a silvery sheen on top of her dark skin. Her fingers and toes stayed long, tipped by claws that had become somehow delicate, and the blades and ridges of the Hork-Bajir form adopted the same color as her skin. She stayed that way for a breath, then was suddenly Cassie again, standing barefoot in our kitchen wearing a black leotard.

Rachel abandoned her spot at the table to grab the kitchen bathrobe/slipper set and hand it to her friend. Cassie accepted with a quiet "thank you," and slipped into the robe. She gave Rachel a quick hug. Loren turned his head away from the bottle, and I looked down to see that he had finally drained it. I put the bottle down, and looked up to see Cassie’s gentle eyes fixed on Loren, a half smile on her face.

“Can I hold him?” she asked softly. Loren’s brown eyes stared right back at her.

“I have already had the honor of hollllllllding Loren today, Cassie,” Ax spoke up from where he was picking up stray pieces of the girls’ eggs off the table and eating them. “Therefore, you can hold him next. xt.”

“You can’t just give away our baby, Ax,” Rachel snapped, lifting Loren out of my arms and depositing him in Cassie’s. I settled for rolling my eyes and sharing a long-suffering glance with Cassie, who was unsuccessfully trying to hold back a grin. Then I remembered why she was here and pushed back from the table.

"Do you want some coffee? Eggs?" The desire to pace was something that had come back as I spent more and more time in human morph, and I tried to suppress the restless energy, the elevated heart rate, the tension that coiled down each of my limbs.

"Coffee would be lovely, thank you," Cassie answered, as gracious as ever.

"Hot chocolate!" Ax declared imperiously from his seat at the table. I rolled my eyes as I poured more hot water. After all these years, Ax still couldn't seem to be polite while in his human morph. Spending so much time ordering around other Andalites hadn't helped his attitude.

"Why are you here, Cassie?" Rachel asked as we all settled in around the table with fresh mugs. "Not that I'm not happy to see you, but you usually have so much to do at the lab."

Cassie looked up from where she had been letting Loren suck on her finger, her face suddenly serious.

"I have some bad news," she said, and my human head began to hurt. Cassie met my eyes with her deep, soulful gaze. "The results have come back from the tests we ran on you the other day, Tobias. Your hawk body is dying."

There was a loud crash as I stood up so fast that I knocked my chair over. Rachel shot up from her seat a heartbeat later, grabbing my arm across the table. I had tried to backwing, to fly out of the room and escape the hard truth that Cassie had brought with her. Heat crept up my face. It had been a long time since I had acted so much like a hawk while in human morph.

"What do you mean?" Rachel nearly yelled at Cassie, who only gave her that sorrowful gaze that was practically her trademark.

"We know that our bodies age even though we return to the same DNA pattern every time we morph," Cassie said, a bit of her "professor" voice creeping into her tone. "And our morphs seem to age with us." She gestured towards my human body as an example.

"There's a lot of complicated science behind it, but basically the DNA that's in our bloodstream ages even when we're not in that morph. But I’m avoiding the point." Cassie took a deep breath.

"The point is that Tobias's hawk body is very old. So old that even though it's restored to its optimal condition several times a day, it's still not working very well. Tobias's eyesight and hearing are failing, his bones will break even more easily. If he spends too long as a hawk his feathers are going to fall out and his organs will begin to fail. Very soon, his body will give out completely. He could just… die in his sleep."

Rachel and I stood there, absorbing the information. Ax actually set down his hot chocolate, his face grim.

"There's something we can do, right?" Rachel's plea was something between a whisper and a shout. "There has to be something."

"Tobias will have to become a nothlit. Again." Ax spoke up from the other end of the table. Cassie nodded in agreement.

"It will have to be soon, too," she added. "Otherwise, it's entirely possible that your body will just… stop working."

A _nothlit._ Again. Trapped again. Forever locked away from half of myself.

Rachel released my arm and sat down abruptly, her face in her hands. There were several moments of silence before our brooding was interrupted by the beeping of my watch. I stared at my wrist for a long moment, then turned off the alarm and slipped the watch off my wrist. I dropped the watch back into the robe pocket, then took off the robe and hung it on an empty hook in the kitchen. I righted the chair I had knocked over, then demorphed.

My body shrank, my skin hardening into a pattern of feathers for a moment before the patterns became reality. My bones hollowed out, then reshaped themselves into a raptor's skeleton, my organs squishing into place a moment later. An eruption of talons and beak, and suddenly I was in what I had many years ago come to think of as my "real" body. I fluttered up off the floor - it took so much more effort these days - and perched on the back of my chair. Ax followed my lead as the inherent Andalite timesense told him his own time in morph was coming to an end.

I stared out the window over the top of Rachel’s head, acknowledging for the first time the fact that my eyes didn’t focus as well as they used to. I looked around the table at our strange little family - two women, a baby, an Andalite, and a hawk. The sounds of the girls getting ready down the hallway became running footsteps, and my daughters barreled into the kitchen.

“Bye Mommy! Bye Daddy! Bye Aunt Cassie! Bye Unkie Ax! Bye Loren!” The girls ran around the kitchen, dispensing energetic hugs or soft kisses depending on the fragility of their target. Ellie ran her hand through my feathers, and then they were out the door with Jak and gone to another day at school.

With the girls and their keeper gone, silence cloaked the house. Rachel’s eyes stared right through me. Cassie looked down at the table. Ax tried not to let me see him staring at the unwashed egg pan in the sink. I could barely hear Rachel’s heart beating hard and fast, her breath too quick.

<How long,> I asked, mostly to break the suffocating silence.

“Five days,” Cassie answered, her voice soft but unflinching. “It would be better if you did it now but… After five days, we can’t give you much of a chance at all.”


	2. Tobias

My name is Tobias Fangor. I am a man, and a hawk. I'm also half alien, kind of. I'm the husband of Rachel Berenson, the father of Elanor, Nicole, and Loren, three beautiful Human children. And although the Yeerk Wars ended fifteen years ago, I am still an Animorph.

Now I was also dying. 

I didn’t have to die. It was an easy fix. Quick. Only two hours in another morph, in a body that wasn’t  _ mine _ , or at least wasn't all of me, and I’d be fine. Until that body decided to give out, anyway. 

It wasn’t fair. I mean, I of all people know that life isn’t fair. But this was supposed to be our happy ending, right?

I wasn’t really sure how long I’d been sitting there, staring out the window. Cassie had gone back to the Hork-Bajir, after trying unsuccessfully to get me to talk. She could try all she liked; I was paying her to be my doctor, not my therapist. Rachel had told her I just needed some time to process and had finally gotten her friend out the door just before Jordan had come to pick her up. They were going to some press conference for one of our charities, and once again I was staying home. It was just another day. 

I hoped Rachel wasn’t too thrown off by this morning. She would spend the next few days taking care of me, being the strong one, fighting yet another battle just to show me that it would all be ok. Just like she always does.

<Ax. You had something you wanted to talk to us about.> The statement came out a little too flat, but I was grateful to have something else to think about. Ax stopped playing with Loren and turned his face towards me, his main eyes widened in surprise and relief.

<Indeed, there is something very important that was brought to my attention last night, but it is a delicate matter.> Ax paused, his stalk eyes scanning the corners of the room, then the ceiling. He was getting antsy, his Andalite nerves frayed after been inside for so long. I felt guilty for keeping him trapped inside for so long, and then realized how little  _ I  _ wanted to be in the house.

<Why don't we go for a walk?>

I fluttered off the chair I’d been perched on, and began my Andalite morph standing on the kitchen floor.

I’d done this morph thousands of times by now, and while every morph was different, the feelings had become routine in a way we had never expected it too when we were first starting out. My wings and feathers vanished as blue fur sprouted everywhere. Then I felt a strange  _ schoolp  _ as my beak and legs shrank into my body and I became a small blue lump lying on the floor. Four Andalite legs and an Andalite face sprouted from my lump, and I was a tiny almost-Andalite. Then I grew and grew, my eyestalks and tail sprouting as I shot up, and there were two Andalites and a baby in the kitchen.

As a child during the war, I had acquired Ax’s DNA and used his body several times during our attempts to Earth’s enslavement at the hands of the Yeerks. But once the war was over, Rachel and I had joined the Human delegation on the Andalite homeworld where Ax’s face is now as famous as his brother's. It was significantly easier to get along with Andalites when you looked like an Andalite, so we’d found another solution. I had combined Ax’s DNA with that of his parents - my grandparents - and created a new morph. A body that I might have been born with, if the universe had gone down a different path. A body that bore an incredible similarity to Elfangor’s.

I pulled Loren’s baby sling off of a wall hook and wrapped it around my Andalite torso, then lifted my son out of Ax’s arms and settled him into it. He had fallen asleep, and only stirred a little during the transfer. My kids got used to all kinds of strange things at an early age.

<Let’s go.>

We stepped out of the house, into the breeze and the shadows of enormous trees. I felt the Andalite relief at being able to see the sky again, and saw Ax relax next to me. When I’d lived on the Andalite homeworld, I’d spent most of my time in Andalite morph. Ax and I were nearly the same now, too alien to be Human and too Human to be alien. And even here, with the huge trees spaced far apart, something deep inside of us longed for open plains on rolling hills underneath the endless sky.

<So what did you want to talk about, Ax-man?>

<You know that Forlay and Noorlin will be arriving in a few days.>

<Yeah, Ax. We’ve been planning this visit for months.> It had only taken Ax’s parents a few weeks of retirement to decide that they weren’t interested in a life of quiet contemplation out in the country. They’d had enough of being separated from their family by duty and distance, and they wanted to meet Elfangor’s grandchildren. So they’d announced that they would be coming to Earth to <find something interesting to do,> in the words of my grandmother.

<They will be the last Andalite tourists I can allow for some months,> Ax said with regret. <The Electorate has deemed the situation on Earth too dangerous for casual travel.>

This was not good news.

<Has the Earth First movement gotten that powerful?>

There were always some Humans who hated the idea of anything new or different, or who were more afraid than reasonable when it came to alien… stuff. There had been threats and even attacks by different groups since the War. Some wanted to close Earth to alien visitors. Others simply wanted Humans to be the most powerful, even if we had to steal and enslave to get there. Since one side had morph-capable intelligence agents and the other side did not, they were pretty easy to find. But we weren’t  _ technically  _ at war anymore, and there wasn’t much we could do if no laws had been broken. Lately, a group called Earth First had been making a lot of noise. Three guesses as to what their motto was.

<We have been receiving threats recently, yes, but there is a larger issue. Last night we stopped an intruder attempting to enter the Meadow with an explosive device.>

<They were going to bomb civilians?> The Meadow was a popular name for the only real Andalite neighborhood, a large, grassy field with hundreds of scoops. It was attached to the Andalite Embassy, and most of the Andalites on Earth lived there. The Meadow housed dozens of Andalite children, most of whom went to school with my daughters. The thought put a chill down my spine.

<Fortunately, our security is excellent,> Ax answered, reliable Andalite pride showing through his anger. 

<It is unthinkable that such a rash attempt would succeed. But the Electorate, and many of our citizens, are… growing disturbed. I have had to make many rash promises just to keep my staff from being ordered back home.>

Ax’s eyestalks drooped as he walked along. It was possible he’d had a worse day than I had.

<Ax, did you get any sleep at all?>

He didn’t answer the question, but he didn’t need to. I remembered how annoyed I was about waking up early to let him in and felt a twinge of guilt. 

<Is there anything we can do to help?>

<I had hoped to borrow the two of you to help us “break the story,” as you humans say. And perhaps to help us when we find the terrorists. But you have enough to occupy you at the moment. We will deal with it ourselves, even if I would prefer to have you there with us.>

Ax rested a hand on my shoulder as we walked. It was a human gesture, but many of the things Ax did were Human, just like many of the things I did were Andalite or hawk-ish.

<Yeah, I think you’re right. Any plans we might have wanted to make have been massively derailed.>

I knew it was the right thing to say but my mind spun with ideas, trying to come up with a plan to help Ax out. I was looking for anything at all that would distract me from my own problems. Ax had probably been doing the same thing earlier, using my new problem to distract from his own.

Loren stirred restlessly against my chest and I sent him comfort. It was the equivalent of Andalite babytalk; a feeling of reassurance alongside a sense of strength and safety. Loren settled down, his anxiety easing into interest in the woodland ride.

We walked in silence for a while, circling back towards the house. Loren would need another bottle soon.

The forest was beautiful. Life was everywhere around us. Trees reached into the sky like pillars of an enormous Greek temple, songbirds settling in their branches. Animals on Earth weren’t any more afraid of Andalites than they were afraid of deer, so we saw dozens of small mammals - squirrels, mice, voles, even a young fox. My stalk eyes scanned the woods around us automatically, Andalite instincts honed by years of using this body. I saw everything that happened around me. There was no other person on the planet who knew his home the way I knew mine. There was the hole where I’d seen a mother badger drag her prey to feed her kits only a month ago. The meadow she lived by has the most beautiful flowers every spring. In that tree I had once frightened off a mob of crows by morphing to Hork-Bajir. They had never bothered me again. Closer to the house we found the rose bush that Naomi had thought would be a good Valentine’s Day gift for Rachel and I a few years ago. It was still going strong, soft pink and yellow blooms beginning to sprout on the thorny branches. As I sent Ax off and warmed up more milk for Loren, I tried not to think about how a fully human me would never see the forest the same way again.

* * * * *

Loren fell asleep in my arms as I fed him, exhausted after his exciting morning. Once he was in his crib, there was only one thing left that could distract me. I went hunting.

The forest was breathtakingly beautiful. Trees reached into the sky like pillars of some forgotten temple, covered with deep green needles. Songbirds of all kinds hopped through their branches and along the forest floor, sharing space with the occasional racoon or lizard. Snakes slithered underneath rocks, ground squirrels peeked out from underneath ferns and bushes, weasels poked out of their holes, looking for food. Everything here was doing it’s best to survive in the incredibly complex cycle of life. Life that we had preserved, because if the Yeerks had been able to do what they wanted with our planet then none of these species would have survived.

The weather was perfect. It was that time of year when the mornings are cool but the days are still warm. There was enough sun shining down onto the trees that blanketed the mountains to create thermals that lifted me high above the leaves. Hawks like flying, but for them it’s more a way to stay safe and find food. They like being up high because they know that they are (almost) the most powerful predators around. Sure, some birds of prey, like eagles, are bigger. Some, like falcons, are faster. But are they better? No. 

The hawk part of me reveled in the invulnerability of flight, the Human part in the joy of it, and the Andalite part in the peace of a beautiful day. I spent a few blissful minutes ignoring everything but the feel of the wind moving over my feathers.

After a while I spotted a plump looking squirrel, a juvenile too stupid to keep his eyes on the sky. He was delicious.

Technically, hunting wasn’t something I had to do anymore. Plenty of hawks lived perfectly normal lives eating only frozen mice. But hawks enjoy hunting, as much as they enjoy anything. And… I’m a hawk. A human too, for sure, and an alien. But also a hawk. For Rachel and I, it was important that we do the things that felt normal to us. We may never be the kind of normal that other people are, but there are still things that feel natural, that feel right. For me, flying and hunting are some of those things. And I was about to lose them, forever. 

The only way I’d regained the power to morph after overstaying the time limit in this body was by the direct intervention of a being called the Elimist who liked to play God with us during the War. We hadn’t seen hide or hair of the creep in the last fifteen years, and I strongly suspected that if he showed up now he would just expect me to thank him for “allowing” me to acquire my own, human DNA. Jerk.

Thinking about the Ellemist soured the beautiful day. I headed back towards the house. Even with Loren asleep and security staff watching the baby monitor, I didn't like to leave my son any longer than I needed to. The hawk part of me worried in a detached way that snakes or crows might get into the nest and harm the chicks. The Andalite part fretted that my children were in danger whenever they were out of sight. It was the human part of me that simply wanted to be near Loren, to watch him sleep and feed him and even change his dirty diapers. 

And standing in the nursery, holding my sleeping son, the choice I had to make didn't seem like such a hard choice after all.


	3. Marco

<How was your experience at work today, Kethritriss?> asked the Andalite on the screen in my living room.

<It was pleasant, although Mirtham-Sarlin-Destarith did not perform his tasks efficiently. This is the twenty third day in a row that he has performed sub-optimally.> Kethritriss huffed into the scoop she shared with her mate. I took a swig of beer, silently agreeing with her. Mirtham needed to man up. Or Andalite up, I guess. He’d only been courting Sookreen for three days! It’s not like they’d been in love.

Kethritriss, nearly life-size on the screen that filled the wall of my pad, kept complaining about her day. Behind her, her mate Barthomoleen suddenly dropped a device he had been working on and the sound made the distracted Kethritriss jump into a defensive posture. A laugh track played. The Human laughter was strange in the Andalite setting.

<My apologies, Kethritriss. I did not intend to scare you, although the effect was indeed humorous,> Barthomoleen explained, mostly for the benefit of Andalites who were new to the idea of sitcoms. During the Artists Exchange nine years ago, we had learned that Andalites had comedians. Sort of. Now, those comedians were making tv shows that could be streamed anywhere. They needed some work.

I got up from the couch, my interest in the show suddenly waning, and headed towards the kitchen. The open floor plan in my bachelor pad meant that I could see the giant TV screen from nearly anywhere inside my house. I stuffed an empty bag of doritos in the overflowing trash can and grabbed a new bottle of Corona out of the fridge, popping the cap off on the edge of the counter. On the TV, Kethritriss took her work stress out on her hapless mate. It could be hard to tell sometimes whether this show was supposed to be a sitcom or just a way for the writers to vent about the stiffness of Andalite culture. I opened the pantry door and surveyed the snacks I had crammed in there, then decided I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t much of anything tonight.

“Alice, turn off the tv.” There was a soft ding from the computer that ran my house system, and the huge screen on my living room wall blinked off. The sudden absence of light and thought-speak drilling into my brain came as a relief. I knew this feeling. Watching Kethritriss and Barthomoleen together had reminded me that I was alone - again - and I had managed to work myself into a bad mood. I had ended things with Alec and Jenny two nights ago, and the breakup blues had set in. It didn’t matter that we’d only been going out for three weeks, or that Alec had been as annoying as he was attractive, or that there were hundreds of other actors, models, baristas, tourists, delivery people, and drivers knocking around LA just waiting for their 15 minutes with me. Tonight, I was lonely.

It was the same thing every time. Meet someone (or two or three someones) new. There’s warm fuzzies all around. Expensive restaurants, pretty jewelry, fabulous outfits, probably a red carpet. Going home with them, maybe bringing them home with me, having pizza delivered, making them breakfast. Everything was perfect, and then something would happen. I would have a nightmare, and they would want to talk about it. They’d come up behind me too quietly. They would want to talk about the war, tell me I was their hero, ask me what it was like. Somehow, they would try to get inside me, to bring my true feelings out into the light of day, to expose me to the world. They always wanted something I just couldn’t give, and so… it always ended.

God, I sounded pathetic. I left my drink on the counter - it wasn’t helping tonight - and wandered through my pad looking for something to do. I rejected the tv outright, I’d finished all the good video games, it was way too early to go to bed. My row of retro arcade games didn’t appeal tonight. Not even the leftover pizza in the fridge seemed appetizing. There was only one option.

I made my way up the staircase to my loft bedroom. This place was so open concept that it wasn’t even a bedroom so much as just the place where my bed happened to be. It was also the place where my gym happened to be. A heartthrob like myself didn’t get that way by drinking beer and eating Doritos all day long. My personal trainer kept me on a pretty strict schedule. Honestly though, this equipment was mostly for show. I preferred to work out in a real gym, with lots of people casting admiring glances and trying to decide if it was worth it to brave my security guys. When I worked out at home it was usually in morph, practicing how to move around various obstacles in the vast space that had been left over when I had carved my pad out of this warehouse. Tonight, though, I wanted to stay in my own body. I wanted to figure out my miserable feelings myself. I wanted to use the punching bag.

I slipped a pair of gloves on and swung my arms around to limber them up. I’d been trained in a few different styles of hand-to-hand while doing action movies, enough so that I could make it look like I knew what I was doing on screen. Tonight, I was going straight up MMA. Jab, cross, bob, in infinite combinations, against an imaginary opponent. By now I had plenty of experience with this kind of fighting, since it was what people wanted to see from their action heroes. I wasn’t any kind of expert, but I knew enough to look good on camera.

It was nice to punch something. Cathartic, even. I imagined Alec’s smug face instead of the smooth surface of the punching bag. At least Jenny’d had the decency to look sad. Alec had acted like he’d rather tell people he used to date me than actually be with me. Jerk.

My phone dinged with a notification from where I had left it on the charging pad in the kitchen. I threw a few more halfhearted punches, but headed over to pick it up. It was probably Cassie - she usually texted about this time, after she had finished closing up the lab - and Cassie got cranky if she had to wait around for a reply. But when I opened the screen, I saw a text from Tobias instead

> _ Hey man. Can we talk? _

* * * * *

There were benefits to owning your own helicopter. Two and a half hours later I sat in a tree in Rachel and Tobias’s backyard, wearing the body of a large great horned owl. Tobias was perched next to me, his hawk body no stranger to me now than any of my other friends - Human, Andalite, Hork-Bajir, or otherwise. But from what he had just told me, Tobias wouldn’t be a hawk for much longer. Or at least not  _ this  _ hawk.

<So, yeah,> Tobias finished out. <Cassie said I need to pick a morph by the end of the week. Or even before that. Otherwise…> He let the thought die out.

<That sucks man.>

I didn’t know what else to say. Tobias’s choice was obvious, but when I really thought about it, the idea of being unable to morph scared me. Deep down, I knew I relied too much on my ability to morph. I used it for everything, work, play, impressing my dates. Being able to morph was the only thing, really, that let me feel safe. I knew what it felt like to die - my blood draining onto the floor, the heaviness in my limbs, the lightness in my head, my thoughts coming slower and slower until all that was left was the instinct to morph back. I didn’t know how I’d be able to live if I could never morph again.

I moved restlessly on the branch, picking up my taloned feet before settling them back around the rough bark. Tobias was hunched down next to me, his hawk brain just as uncomfortable in the dark tonight as it had been ever since he’d first been stuck in that body. 

Stuck. My mind shied away from the horror of it, the idea of being stuck as a nothlit, just as it always had. Through the entire war, and the years after, I had projected this fear onto Tobias. I knew I was being unfair. The times I had shouted at him, belittled him, or made jokes at his expense - he knew what it was too. That I was just trying to cope with the idea of being… stuck. So then, why-

<Why did you ask me to come? Do you want my advice or something?> No sooner had I thought it than the words left my head. Sometimes thoughtspeak was  _ too  _ easy.

<What do you mean, Marco? You’re my friend.> Well, that was the lamest excuse I’d ever heard Tobias make. Now I  _ had  _ to push for an answer.

<Why ask  _ me  _ for advice? Why not Ax? Or Cassie?> Or anyone else. Even Jake would give better life advice than I would, and he was only ever alive when he was on one of his missions.

Tobias was silent for a long time.

<Well,> he started, his nonexistent voice somehow still soft, <I don’t really need any advice. I know what I’m supposed to do.> If Tobias was human, his voice would have started shaking. 

<I guess I figured you would tell me to buckle down and do it. Rachel has her own agenda and I know what she wants. Cassie- She has too much pity. Ax “won’t meddle in human affairs.” And Jake… No. I need someone to tell me to man up and just do it.> Tobias had slicked his feathers back with the avian instinct to hide.

Well, if that was all he needed. I could do  _ that.  _ I decided to show off a little.

I pushed off from the branch, the great horned owl’s powerful wingbeats pulling me into the sky where my body belonged. The branch we’d perched on wasn’t very high, and a move I’d practiced for one of my movies sent me hurtling towards the ground. Like a real owl I let my wings catch the air, and began to demorph as I dove. The sequence that had taken so long when I’d first learned it took hardly any time at all now, and I landed in a superhero pose as a fully formed human, my morphing outfit of skinny jeans and a wife beater not quite enough to keep me warm in the mountain night.

I stood up, brushing dirt off my knee, and looked for Tobias among the shadows of the tree’s branches. When I found him, he didn’t look properly impressed with my moves. Some birds just didn’t get it.

“Tobias, stop being an idiot,” I began, already warming to my topic. There just weren’t enough opportunities to lecture people when you were a Savior Of The Universe and An Example To The Rest Of Humanity. “I shouldn’t have to spell this out for you. After everything  _ I  _ went through to piece  _ my  _ family back together, do you think I’m just going to stand here and let you abandon yours?

“It doesn’t matter how you feel. It doesn’t matter how much you like having to hunt your dinner or sleep on a perch instead of a bed, or whatever. It doesn’t matter that you’ll be the only Animorph who can’t morph, or that you’ll be helpless, or that you’ll never be able to fly again.”

I took a deep breath. My voice almost shook with that last one. I clamped down,  _ hard, _ on any feelings of pity. That wasn’t what Tobias needed.

“What matters is that you’ll be alive. You’ll still  _ be there. _ For Rachel and the kids. For your mom.

“We didn’t fight this whole war, then build this new world, so that you could just  _ give up! _ So you’re not giving up. You’re not allowed to. You’re  _ not _ going to just let yourself die, and you’re  _ not  _ going to pick another hawk morph, or an Andalite morph, or whatever it is you’ve been thinking about doing. You’re going to be a human, just like you were always supposed to be.”

Tobias didn’t look impressed with my speech, even though it was the most impressive speech I’d delivered all week. Even the “rallying the troops” speech I’d done on set the other day hadn’t come close.  _ Maybe I should look into screenwriting next. I would be better at it than some of the idiots out there.  _ Rather than puffing up with pride and newfound determination, Tobias had shrunk himself even more when I mentioned finding another hawk morph. Maybe I’d been a little  _ too _ on the nose.

“Look.” I sat down with my back to the trunk of the tree Tobias was in. “All I know is that your family needs you. They’ll always need you. And you made a choice to be there when they needed you. This is what that means. Some people get sick, some people get depressed, but they still have to fight. To live. To have a  _ good  _ life. And that means  _ you  _ still have to fight.” Now I was talking to myself as much as Tobias. “You’re not giving up. I’m not giving up. Rachel’s not giving up. Someday, even Jake will stop giving up when he sees how good we are at it. This is something we’re doing together. It’s an Animorph thing.

“It’s  _ the _ Animorph thing, actually. Being a nothlit didn’t make you useless the first time, and it won’t this time either. It’s your fighting spirit, the fact that you won’t let yourself get pushed around by Yeerks or life or even Rachel that made you a good Animorph. And you won’t be losing that. So man up and just do it.”

There was a long moment of silence, and then <Thanks, Marco. Tobias even sounded grateful. My speech had worked wonders, obviously. <I think… I think that’s what I needed.> His thoughtspeak sounded a little stronger. <I think I can do this now.>


	4. Marco

I spent the night on the couch in Rachel and Tobias’s house. One of their couches, anyway. They had offered me the guest house and the guest bedroom, but I had decided a while ago that I wasn’t a “guest room” kind of guy. I was the kind of guy who either slept on your couch or in your bed. 

So I slept on the couch. 

Well, sleep wasn’t really the word for it. The house was peaceful enough, the couch was comfortable enough, but my mind wouldn’t quiet down. After a couple of hours I found myself wandering around the expansive house, opening doors and poking around without really looking for anything. I had to hand it to Rachel - she decorated with the same intensity she put into her shopping and her fights to the death. Each of the rooms had a theme or color or something that would have made me suspect an interior decorator was at work if I hadn’t known better.

Seriously though, their smallest linen closet was more put together than my entire house.

Of course, my house was literally a warehouse, so maybe that was my fault.

I studied the tastefully arranged cluster of family photos in the hallway that connected the family’s private living space to the more public living room and kitchen area. There were the typical cute baby photos of the kids, a few family photos in matching outfits, one with the new baby that had the family dressed to complement Tobias’s hawk body. There were photos of Tobias and Rachel in Andalite morph and hawk morph and human morph interspersed between photos of their kids, even a couple of candid photos of the pair. My favorite was one where Rachel’s sister, Sarah, had caught Tobias landing on Rachel’s bare arm. His wings were flared back, his sharp talons closing carefulling around her skin. Rachel was laughing, with her long, blond hair blowing in the slight breeze. I remembered that day. Rachel had been laughing too hard for Tobias to land easily, and he’d ended up sinking his talons into her arm. One quick morph and our injuries were gone, but there was nothing we could do about the scars on our thoughts and emotions.

I studied the large wedding photo that served as a centerpiece for the wall of pictures. Rachel looked particularly stunning in her sheer, strapless dress. Next to her, Tobias looked almost unrumpled. The wedding had taken place only a few weeks after they had returned from the Andalite homeworld, when both of them were out of practice at being human. Rachel's smile looked almost natural, but Tobias's would have made anyone suspect that he was a serial killer. 

Even so, they seemed to match each other perfectly. Until tonight, I would have said that all of us but Jake had gotten our happy ending.

I pressed a knob on the bottom of the picture frame and the force field/hologram that was pretending to be the wall next to the display vanished. I went down the newly revealed stairs to the house's basement level. The secret entrance served to keep the kids (and casual guests) away from the weapons that were stored there.

I stepped off the stairs into the enormous space that had been carved out of the hillside underneath the family's compound.

Every time I was here, the basement was bigger than I expected it to be. There was almost no trace here of the decorative care that had been put into the house above. Instead it looked like a giant’s patchwork quilt, or something out of Alice in Wonderland. The stairs ended next to a large, traditional dojo that took up a corner of the space, with weapons from many Earth martial arts lining the walls. At the side of the dojo were various types of punching bags and other equipment, and on the other side of those were a few beat up couches set against the wall along with crates containing the kinds of weapons that only Rachel could talk a customs officer into letting onto the planet. If there was another alien invasion, Rachel and Tobias would be prepared.

Past that was one end of the saltwater “pond,” which lined the entire back wall. The center was planted with Andalite grasses, basically a miniature prairie. There was also space for the freshwater “pond,” as well as other types of simulated terrain and obstacles. It was a space for training in morph, like my warehouse, but with actual thought and effort put into it.

I decided to have some fun, and headed over to the punching bags. I hadn’t finished my workout earlier anyway. I’d only just gotten warmed up when I heard the sound of someone coming down the staircase behind me.

“Marco, are you wearing tennis shoes on my tatami mats?”

“No, of course not.” I grinned at Rachel as I pulled off my shoes and tossed them towards the staircase. “I’m wearing Jordans.”

“I can’t believe I let you in my house,” she scowled as she stepped onto the mat, barefoot.

“Isn’t it Tobias’s house too?” I asked with total innocence.

“I can’t believe  _ we  _ let you into  _ our  _ house,” Rachel said, only mildly annoyed. I would need to up my game. 

Rachel strode across the mat until she stood in front of an intimidating wooden practice dummy, sized it up, and struck. It was a delight to watch her. Not just because she was beautiful, fierce, a fantastic fighter. During the war, fighting had become an inseparable part of Rachel. She, more than any of us, had reveled in the feeling of invincibility that comes from defeating your enemies by your own cunning and power. But what we hadn’t known as kids, when we waded through the blood of our enemies (or own blood) every few days, was that that feeling didn’t have to come from killing. Any type of excellence, any sense of triumph over others - or over ourselves - could bring back a taste of it. Just a taste, but it comes without the revulsion of knowing that for each enemy life you take, an innocent dies too. It comes without the nightmares.

For me it was being a star, watching my work top the charts, reading rave reviews, listening to the crowds calling my name. Not the healthiest coping mechanism, but it’s better than nothing. Cassie and Ax found it in their work, as they threw themselves into creating new methods of interspecies communication or discovering new truths about the universe. Tobias seemed to thrive on self-improvement alone, and of course Jake only really came alive when he was leading some mission or another. But Rachel, even though she excelled at everything she tried, only seemed to find her peace through fighting.

There’s nothing like watching a person demonstrate their ability to kill with their bare hands, especially when you know you’re perfectly safe. Well, reasonably safe. Teasing Rachel was my way of living on the edge. Rachel was a whirlwind of blond hair, fists and feet, and pink silk pajamas, the cracks from where she hit the dummy’s arms making me wince in sympathy. when she stopped, she wasn't even winded. She stepped back from the dummy, rolling her shoulder experimentally.

“I should’ve warmed up.” Rachel looked over at me, wearing one of her let’s-do-it grins. “Want to spar?”

"Only if you promise not to leave too many bruises. Can't have Tobias thinking you're cheating on him." Once again, only an eyeroll. Was I losing my touch, or was she approaching some kind of zen state?

Rachel strode over to the dojo wall and took down two longish sticks. "You ever learn Kali?" she called over her shoulder.

“Only enough to look good on camera,” I answered. I’d done a lot more training with hand to hand then with any weapons, but I wasn’t about to say no and risk her losing interest.

“I’ll teach you.” She flipped one of the sticks over the mat towards me. I managed to snatch it out of the air in a cool and definitely manly way. Rachel pulled a hair tie off her wrist and put her hair up in a flawless bun.  _ It’s not fair how she can do that so quickly,  _ I complained to myself. Then it was time to fight.

Rachel really  _ was _ a good teacher, as long as you did everything she said right the first time. Kali was an art that developed to teach machete skills, and it involved a lot more chopping than sword-based styles. Rachel taught me one drill after another until we moved in sync, our breathing punctuated by the snap of bamboo against bamboo. I always enjoyed the way it felt to move in concert with someone, knowing exactly where they would be, knowing exactly where you should go to meet them. Dancing was nice but fighting worked just as well, and here there were no club lights or pounding music or press of humanity to distract from the sheer joy of movement.

Rachel’s stick came down harder and faster as we went along, challenging me to keep up the momentum and the pressure. Faster and faster we went until one last  _ crack _ sent the stick spinning out of my hand and onto the mat. I went down after it, disarmed and exhausted.

“Ok, you win.” I held up my hands in surrender and Rachel stepped back, the gleam of triumph in her eyes a little too gleamy for my taste. “And what prize, fair maiden, dost thou desirest of me?”

“Like I want anything from  _ you, _ ” Rachel scoffed. But she put down her stick and relaxed next to me on the mat, so I called it a win.

“So how do you feel about this Tobias thing?” I asked. Rachel sighed heavily.

“It’s new,” she replied. “It’s different. It’s not what we wanted, but I guess we should have expected it.”

“I know  _ that  _ much,” I replied, flopping onto my back on the mat. “But how do you feel?”

“What do you care?” Rachel didn’t wait for my answer, which was good because I didn’t really have one. “I don’t know, Marco. It’s better than him dying.” She let out a heavy sigh. “I won’t really know how I feel about it till after it happens. Tobias has all his feelings before, and I have mine after. You of all people should know that.”

I did, but I was surprised to hear her admit it.

“That’s… very self-aware of you.” Rachel laughed.

“It’s the therapy.” She smoothed her long blond hair back over her shoulder with a sardonic smile. “It makes you nothing if not self-aware.”

“Ah yes, the shrinks.” 

To my lasting surprise, Rachel and Tobias had been the ones out of our band of misfits to continue using strangers for advice. Sure, we’d all needed therapy after the War, and probably still needed it. But even after we’d graduated from our government-mandated-therapy-for-child-soldiers, Rachel and Tobias had kept it up. It seemed to be working for them though. I had never really thought that Rachel would survive what the War had done to her; what, if I was being honest,  _ we _ had done to her. And yet here she was, a bastion of stability. It was enough to make a guy jealous.

“I know, they’re not really your thing.” Rachel laid down on her side, her beautiful face suddenly serious. “Thank you for coming to talk to him tonight. He’s been really freaked out, but you must have said the right thing.”

“I always know the right thing to say. I’m, like, the king of advice-givers.”

“You’re a wrinkled old man, sitting on a mountaintop in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’ll have you know, I have no wrinkles. My skin is as flawless as a baby’s butt.”

Rachel laughed, and I grinned. One more for me.

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever changed a diaper.” 

I shuddered, sitting up on the mat.

“No thank you. Not in a million years. You couldn’t pay me enough for that.”

“But you like playing with the girls.” Rachel looked at me intently, propped up on one elbow.

“Well, who wouldn’t,” I said defensively. “They’re cute, and they like my stories.”

“And you like to give them advice, and you send them ridiculous Christmas presents.”

“So?”

“It’s nothing. I’m just trying to get you to admit that you like kids.”

“I like  _ your  _ kids,” I said grudgingly. That was as much as I was willing to admit.

“Good enough. So what was El asking you about after dinner?”

“Morphing. Why?”

“I thought that might be it.” Rachel sighed. “She’s been asking us lately when she’ll be able to morph. We’ve been trying to distract her, but she’s trying to find out everything she can about it.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told her about the blue box then.” I dodged a lazy punch. “Kidding. But now that you mention it, it did kind of feel like she was digging for information. The kid’s too smart for her own good.”

“They all are. It’s just my luck, to get stuck raising a bunch of geniuses.” Even so, the thought of her kids put a smile on Rachel's face. She sprang off the floor, then pulled me up after her. I tried to cover a yawn as the intense exercise overcame my mood and my body finally realized it was four in the morning.

“Looks like it’s time to go to bed.” Rachel herded me up the staircase. “And this time try not to trip any alarms, ok? It’ll be Tobias’s turn next, and he’s grumpy when he doesn’t get enough sleep.” I flushed, glad that she couldn’t see my face. Of course they would know when someone went into the basement. That’s where all the weapons were.

“And here I thought you came looking for a good time.”

“Not with  _ you, _ ” Rachel scoffed. “And don’t forget to go to sleep this time,” she called after me as I headed back to my couch. This time I had barely pulled the blanket over myself before I fell asleep.


End file.
